Tech Events by Alliance Manchester Business School

with Damian Grimshaw (Professor of Employment Studies, King's College London)

The Work and Equalities Institute's annual lecture at Alliance Manchester Business School, this year on how AI is changing jobs, built on new evidence from the UK video games industry. Damian Grimshaw, Professor of Employment Studies at King's College London and former research director at the International Labour Organisation, sets out four lenses: whether AI automates or augments work, how employers use it to reshape control, how professional roles shift around it, and how AI firms capture value from established organisations. His games-industry data shows what he calls bypassing practices, where some workers' AI use overlaps with or cuts out other technical groups, and work moves to specialist AI firms. He closes on what unions, employers and government should do about it. Lecture 15:00 to 16:30, then drinks until 17:00. Free. Why go: one of the few Manchester rooms looking at AI adoption from the workforce side with real data rather than vendor case studies. Best for people leaders, engineering managers and anyone in games or creative tech.

A Manchester Institute of Innovation Research seminar at Alliance Manchester Business School with Professor Erik Stam of Utrecht University, where he is Full Professor of Strategy, Organization and Entrepreneurship and academic director of the Center for Entrepreneurship. Stam presents work on entrepreneurial ecosystems in Africa. The problem he sets up is that data on the conditions for productive entrepreneurship across the continent is scarce, which makes it very hard to improve those conditions in a context-specific way. His team pulled from public, private, global and African sources to build a dataset of 21 indicators measuring seven dimensions of national entrepreneurial ecosystems. One hour, late afternoon, with an online option as well as the room. Why go: Stam's ecosystem framework is one of the more cited in the field and this is a rare chance to question it directly. Best for policy people, ecosystem builders and researchers.

Alliance Manchester Business School hosts the latest instalment of its Scale Up Series, focused on how scaling companies are actually embedding AI across their org — not the vendor story, the operator story. Part of Manchester Tech Week's fringe programme.